Dead Man Blogging

Poor Marketing Techniques.. Microsoft Office in China..

bhargavsp — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:16:47 +0000

Microsoft recently announced that they would be cutting the selling price for MS Office 2007 Home from $102 to $29 in China. They said they were aiming to cut down piracy in the country which is well known for the same and infact leading the world in the field..

I ask, whats the darn use??

Piracy will never stop just becuase someone cuts down the price of a freely available product!! Piracy is so rampant in China that ‘m sure most of them woulda forgotten that people sold software at all!! The guys @ Microsoft will never get anywhere even near reducing piracy by 1%..

The only way to stop piracy is to turn open-source!!.. stop using Windows.. Run Linux.. Use AbiWord instead of MS office.. Now thats what you should call a solution..

Hyperspace, A must read..

bhargavsp — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:57:19 +0000

Hey all those quantum mechanics and string theory buffs out there, this book is a must read for
you..

Title: Hyperspace
Author: Michio Kaku
ISBN: 0-385-47705-8

If you like reading science fiction, understanding the science behind these in those novels will add a layer of enjoyment. If you like spaceships, time travel, or extra dimensions, read Michio Kaku’s phenomenal books.

I found Michio Kaku a few months ago when I read Hyperspace. It’s a phenomenal book, not only because it very clearly explains the journey that physics has taken from Euclidian geometry to the 1990s. (It was published in 1994.) While the latest research in physics is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, this book is an excellent primer to begin to understand what the heck is going on nowadays.

It’s also a really interesting book about the sidestreets and dead-ends of the physics journey.

If you’ve already read Stephen Hawking’s books, The brief history of time, The universe in a nutshell and The theory of everything, this book should be a piece of cake!

Bored with your mp3 player’s obsolete firmware?? Don’t worry. Rockbox is here!!

bhargavsp — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:45:22 +0000

A few weeks ago, i came across this wonderful pieca firmware.. RockBox, compatible with all generations of Apple’s iPODs, Sansa e200 and c200 series players and a few others.. Zen users would have to wait a lil more before the firmware, which is written and maintained by RockBox Inc will be released for their players.

Rockbox takes the whole conecpt of “linux-ifying” to a new level!! I could do nothing with my Sansa e280′s ol’ firmware (not that it is obsolete) but once i tried RockBox on a 20 Mbyte partition, i found it amazing!! THE BEST feature was that RockBox could access and archive songs from the other partition in the memory even though it was formatted with a different file system!! This is the same as “mounting” a windows drive on PCs running linux.

With RockBox installed, I could play CHESS WITH THE PLAYER (came with inbuilt AI) and use the player as a stopwatch, text reader and even make it play file formats which were not supported by the player’s original firmware!! (codecs did the job).

I highly recommend that ppl shift to RockBox not just because it suits my craving for “linux-ifying” things, but because IT IS WONDERFUL!!

Firefox/Flock/Netscape addons not working with orkut.co.in?.. well, i’ve a solution.. :)

bhargavsp — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:37:30 +0000

Firefox/Flock/Netscape users from India!! Do you see nowadays that when you log into orkut, you are redirected to orkut.co.in?? and do you also see that your add-ons don’t work now?? well this is nothing to be worried bout.. don’t wait for some programmer to develop an add-on for orkut.co.in when you can you can do it yourself!!.

You must be having the “.xpi” (pronounced zippy) file of the extension..

1.Rename the .xpi file to .zip.. (zippy files are nothing but renamed zip files!! )
2.Extract the files from the zip file using WinRAR, KGB, WinZip or any such software..
3.Go to the “content folder”.. you’ll find “.xul” and “.js” files…
4.Open them one by one in notepad and replace every occurence of “orkut.com” by “orkut.co.in” (use the inbuilt replacer.. Ctrl+H)..
5. after that, do the reverse of steps 1 and 2.. (compress the files to a zip and rename it to xpi.. )

You’re Done!!

Now, if you don’t want to fiddle with the old extension file or if you are too lazy to do it, i have just what the doctor ordered!! .. i’ve edited an orkut helper extension myself!!.. get it here..

Happy Orkutting, the DIY way!!

Sonnenkinder.